We look around us now, and the Internet is in every bit of our lives, from the phone in our hands to the smart bulbs at home. It’s easy to forget that the Internet is a recent invention, and not exactly a thing from a distant past. Some of the people who saw it emerge from scratch and even helped shape it are still alive. One of them is Esther Dyson, a Swiss-American journalist, entrepreneur, and IT expert. We may call her a cyber libertarian, too.

She was born in 1951 in Switzerland to the mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson and the physicist Freeman Dyson —the pioneer behind Dyson Spheres. There was no Internet or computers in Esther’s life for a long while. In 1969, when she was 18, the very first nodes of the ARPANET went online between universities in California and Utah, which is considered the Internet’s birth.

It wouldn’t be until the 80s that more “modern” systems would appear, and not until 1991 that the World Wide Web became publicly available. By that time, Esther was 40, had graduated with a degree in economics from Harvard, and was deeply immersed in the earliest online world.

In 1983, she bought Rosen Research and transformed it into EDventure Holdings, publishing the influential Release 1.0 newsletter and leading the annual PC Forum tech conference that reunited visionaries and the most influential figures and investors of the time. This way, Dyson was already championing the open, decentralized potential of the early Internet.

She also served on the board and later chaired the

A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age

“Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” is a manifesto co-authored by Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, published in 1994. These thinkers gathered to analyze what cyberspace was and how it could be a fair place for everyone.

"Cyberspace is the land of knowledge, and the exploration of that land can be a civilization's truest, highest calling. The opportunity is now before us to empower every person to pursue that calling in his or her own way. The challenge is as daunting as the opportunity is great. The Third Wave [the age of Internet] has profound implications for the nature and meaning of property, of the marketplace, of community and of individual freedom."

Not every bit of the text aged well, but there are certainly some points we can draw on that remain relevant today. As they predicted, in this land of chaotic knowledge that the Internet became, traditional government controls and many old economic rules have struggled to keep up. Indeed, the document champions individual freedom and decentralized decision-making.

It envisioned cyberspace as a place where people could connect, create, and trade with fewer barriers imposed by governments or large institutions. The authors favored open networks, private innovation, and personal responsibility over heavy regulation, arguing that the digital age would empower individuals and communities in ways that were previously impossible. Good news: they were right in that.

Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age

Dyson didn’t stop with the Magna Carta and the Release 1.0 newsletter. She also wrote and published a whole book on her thoughts about the then-nascent cyberspace, called “Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age” (1997). It was highly educational for people that were barely starting to see computers around, and it predicted many things right by exploring themes like governance, intellectual property, content control, privacy, and decentralization.

The latter is a strong topic all across

“The greatest structural impact of the Net is decentralization; things and people no longer depend on a center to be connected (…) Decentralization is a profound and destabilizing force. It affects not just governments, but businesses, media, healthcare, organized religion, and all other establishments. It changes the balance of power between large/rich and small/poor countries, in part by offering their citizens and companies a level playing field without regard to traditional borders.”

The author also stressed that greater freedom comes with greater responsibility: users must make thoughtful choices, protect their reputations, and help build trustworthy online communities. In general, the book was optimistic about the future, but Dyson

ICANN

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (

Dyson and other early Internet governance thinkers pushed the idea that this system should be privately coordinated, multi-stakeholder, and relatively decentralized, meaning no single government would fully control it. ICANN made this possible, and it still exists as a non-profit to serve in the management of domains worldwide.

Without domains, we’d need to type long IP addresses to reach websites, and without ICANN, the same domain (example.com) could lead to very different websites depending on the country or region. Therefore, the Internet would be a very confusing place.

Not everything turned out perfectly, though. Dyson, who stepped down from ICANN in 2000, has even said that the organization “has become a real cesspool,” and it's drowning its original mission in politics and potential censorship. Maybe that’s why more

Investments & Governance in Crypto

Today, Dyson is mostly recognized as an angel investor worldwide. She’s funded a long list of well-known companies, including Alphabet, Square (now Block), Flickr, Yandex, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, she’s been especially

Despite her belief in a free, decentralized Internet, she hasn’t been very active in the crypto ecosystem. She offered an opinion on it, though. During a TEDx event in 2022, Dyson mentioned that this new technology is “exciting,” but we shouldn’t forget to monitor and model governance according to the real users, and not just the larger token holders.

It is, in fact, a recurring concern that a single company or other centralized entity could acquire the vast majority of tokens on a decentralized platform to gain the most voting power. Dyson proposes using "deliberative democracy," where decisions would be made by randomly selected users who would actually have to consider the circumstances of the decision at hand.

Crypto networks are evolving every day, so this solution may as well be applied by some of them in the future. For now, in our quest for greater decentralization, networks like

Don’t forget to check other cyber-libertarians and cypherpunks:

Featured Vector Image by TheDigitalArtist / PixabayPhotograph of Esther Dyson on Edventure